Developing successful marketing campaigns backed by ad testing

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Take the guesswork out of creating ad campaigns by tapping into the same customer feedback that helped you build your products in your ad testing.

Great products still need great marketing campaigns. Campaigns backed by strategic market research, in-depth surveys, and consumer interviews have a much higher chance of driving demand, creating awareness, and promoting brand equity among consumers.

Luckily, the process for developing and launching successful campaigns based on market research is the same as the process you used to develop your products in the first place. 

A methodical approach to ad testing blends qualitative and quantitative research. Whether you’re ad testing for digital, print, TV, radio, web, or mobile, you can be sure the campaigns you’re building speak to your consumers, address their needs, and motivate their purchasing behaviors. 

With that in mind, today we’re looking at the third stage in Suzy’s four-step approach to agile research: campaign development.

Why is ad testing crucial to campaign development success?

To compete in modern markets, your organization has to take on a truly multi-dimensional approach. As Senior VP of Market Research William Cimarosa once said, “if you don’t start to rethink the tools you have in your toolkit, you risk getting left behind.” 

Product development only goes as far as your ability to reach consumers where they are and with what they need to make purchasing decisions. Strong marketing campaigns based on qualitative and quantitative research provide you with everything you need to accomplish this. 

While ad testing used to be an expensive and time-consuming process, Suzy builds your audience right into the platform so you can access the same on-demand survey group from foundational learning all the way through campaign development.

How to use on-demand ad testing to create great campaigns

Like everything in this process, creating campaigns starts with an idea—or with several ideas. Using your understanding of your target market, marketing teams can build a marketing strategy and develop ad creative to ad test with consumers. Take that consumer consideration and feedback and continue to test ad iterations. This is where you can fine-tune the campaign messaging and branding and begin to understand its potential.

“It [gives] us some insights into how we might target different consumers with messaging that’s more relevant to them, or if there are certain promotions or activations that are more relevant for an in-store consumer than for a digital consumer,” says Ally Sigmon, Consumer Insights Manager at Chipotle.

Test your copy to see what your consumers are taking away from your messaging and why it matters to them. Run brand recall and relevance diagnostics. 

Keep iterating until you’ve outperformed benchmarks. In other words, when new campaign assets perform better with consumers than existing campaign assets, or better than your competitors. 

Campaign development in action

In the first two blogs in this series, we walked through how one of our clients in the pet food industry used the foundational learning and innovation pipeline frameworks to develop new product ideas and test those new concepts with consumers.

That same client then used on-demand ad testing to determine the best ways to market their new product. The brand tapped into survey panels to test different campaign elements in real-time, such as copy, calls to action, taglines, fonts, colors, and more.

Using consumer feedback from their target consumers, the pet food brand was able to make iterative, data-driven decisions about which campaign assets would most effectively drive demand, brand awareness, and purchase intent. 

Accessing the same on-demand consumer sets for both idea generation and campaign testing gave them continuity across the entire process. That continuity allowed them to go to market with the confidence that their target consumers were both interested in their product and receptive to their marketing campaign.

Interested in learning more about building an agile, on-demand market research strategy? Read more in our eBook.